Assessment in Counseling

Abstract Too often students experience assessment courses, and subsequently the textbooks used for the course, as a statistics-heavy class accompanied by an encyclopedia of a variety of assessments. The authors take a different approach. Their approach was to create a text that would emphasize assessment as a skill for professional counselors. They emphasize the skills used in assessment and believe that once the reader understands the skills, they can apply these skills across a broad range of assessment instruments and strategies. Assessment, like most core areas of counseling, has a theoretical basis and a pertinent, practical component. However, this practical component often gets lost in the application of the skills and use of instruments that heavily rely on psychometric properties. Instead of introducing readers to a plethora of instruments, the authors select seminal measures that the reader is likely to comes across and use in the profession. They do not focus on types of assessments typically not used by professional counselors, such as projective measures. The instruments discussed are commonly used in professional counseling but by no means exhaustive. But, through the use of this text and course content, the reader will have the skills to search, select, and administer the type of assessment instruments that they deem helpful for their practice as a professional counselor, regardless of specialization. Through this format, readers will see examples of assessment principles that may be applied to a variety of settings. The goal for this textbook is to serve as a guide for administering, scoring, interpreting, and communicating assessment results.